The Plink

A tiny life-form not consciously malignant but nevertheless to be careful of…it could get you into a lot of trouble!

Full Description

The Plink don’t look alive at all. They do look very attractive however, especially in the dark when they are most visible. .

Additional Information

Often they appear as scattered points of light on the ground sparkling and winking at unsuspecting persons taking an evening stroll. These quaint beings position themselves around the sites of old diamond mines; the idea is to fool passers-by into thinking they are invaluable gems capable bringing untold wealth to their finder.

What is so insidious about these things then? It so happens that when some chubby villager tries to pick one of the ‘diamonds’ up with his clumsy fingers the delicate structure of the Plink disintegrates and reforms into a chain like complex molecule. This then attaches itself to a water molecule on the skin and quickly burrows its way into the bloodstream of the victim.

Of course the poor creature doesnt know what happened or what is going to happen next. He just feels mildly frustrated and then continues on his way.

The Plink then happily traverses through the bloodstream of the victim and lodges itself in the bone marrow of the victims. It then then proceeds to employ the reproductive apparatus of the human cells to multiply.

When the level of Plink in the blood stream reach a critical level the blood becomes so viscous that it no longer can perform its functions of supplying nutrients to the human cells. The hearts stops beating and the rising mineral level in the veins cause the sick man’s body to stiffen and his family to mourn his imminent death.

The reproductive process does not end with the death of the host. The Plink will continue to multiply as long as there are living cells in the deceased’s body. Since the Plink reproduce exponentially rather than through a simple division, even this short time is of value.

As the body decays the Plink slowly ooze out of any orifices. When there is any rainfall the Plink come into contact with water molecules that have seeped into the soil and are drawn up to the ground surface by capillary action.

The Plink themselves are unaware of their aggression. They see humans not as living beings but mere conduits for their propagation. They are driven by this desire and all their activity including their strategic positioning is motivated by it.

It is believed that the Plink are part of a master plan; children of dying stars in space that seek to communicate to the Plink through their twinkling the need to return all of time and space to the beginning. The beginning when there was nothing but light. The exponential propagation of the Plink will slowly but surely return the Light and banish darkness. Till then the Plink must continue to fulfil the mandate issued to them by their ancestors in the sky.

What seems to be simple twinkling of these stars is in fact a morse code like system of communication. The sentience of the Plink is limited to the interpretation of this code. In general the message that is intepreted is of propagation. Occasionally however, a variant tune is sounded. One that rallies the Plink not just to propagate themselves but to target a specific human or group of humans.

The Plink themselves lack the faculty to discern that these messages are not really from their forefathers but rather originate from more sinister quarters.

To understand this occurence one has to harken back a few million light years.

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The concept is solid, but perhaps a little more description about the process that birth them would be great, as would the greater elaboration into the numerous beliefs that humans have formed about them.

To make this better, you should "block out" each section. Each section should have its own purpose (something to specifically explain or express). You should then order those blocked section into a pattern than makes the most sense. Ideally each section would lead to the next one, or you could use headers.

The point of view and "narration" changes. Who is telling us this information (an informed scientific narrator? omnicient deity? some fantasy scholar?

Now why aren't they using animals?
Do people not notice the oozing material out of the corpse? Can't they be infected when they touch it?

This reminds me of the gray goo nightmare scenario that people think will happen with nanobots.
I like the flicker flash or sparkle idea and the way they burrow into a person.
Is there a cure to the infection or any other symptoms such as hardening of the skin, a sheen to the hair, sparkles in the eye?

5-8-09
Ooo, sparkly eyes as a symptom "Plink Eye"

Also, could that tune that you wrote of be reversed or a code could actually be the cure

The only issue I have here is that the Plink breaks up upon being touched. If it's broken, how does it reproduce? If it's a molecular chain and that's all, it can't have any intelligence. It sounds more like a bacterial colony than anything else, perhaps a fungus? If you want to make it a semi-intelligent life form, the best way to do it might be to say that the Plink burrows in through a pore, and floats around in the bloodstream, before lodging itself into the bone marrow. Because a creature that breaks up and then reproduces doesn't make much sense, at least not to me, unless it breaks up and reassembles itself inside the body as a creature, rather than a molecule. That's just my take. Other than this, good jorb.